The Hobbit was a light, amusing story. LOTR was dark, dense, brooding. The clips I’ve seen sound like he’s using this as an excuse to make another LOTR, down to the length. I assume no one in the film industry is brave enough (or can set their greed aside enough) to say, “Ah, Peter? Bad idea. Get a grip on yourself.” Psychiatrist, not milkshake.

@ Adam. Believe me–never thought I would say such a thing..like saying “too much bacon”…but..have you re-watched the dinosaur stampede lately? Do you find Jack Black running in front of a green screen enjoyable?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LFQun4HQj8

I didn’t think the King Kong remake was that bad, but I agree that he could have cut out a half-hour to 45 minutes of his “Homage to 1930s New York” and micro-detail such as the fireman on the ship shoveling coal, and it still would have been the same picture. The business with the guys fleeing the dinosaur stampede and blowing away an occasional dino with the Thompson guns: I wondered if that was Peter Jackson doing a one-upsmanship to the scenes in Jurassic Park. Sort of “You wanna see what happens if those dinosaurs chasing folks picked on the wrong bunch of guys?”

By the way, does this mean that Peter Jackson has dropped his 2009 plan to re-film “The Dam Busters”? As you recall, he ran into the problem that there’s language in the original that is very abrasive by modern standards, as well as another problem: It would be one more Remake in a sea of Remakes.

The Hobbit was a light, amusing story if you stopped reading it before the battle scene at the end, which to my young mind (40-plus years ago) was the most searing depiction of war I had yet read. It was obvious to me even as a child that Tolkien knew what he was writing about — I didn’t know yet that he had fought in WWI and had lost many of his closest friends in that brutal and utterly meaningless conflict. That dose of realism in the middle of a fantasy novel is what makes Tolkien’s stuff readable.